


Halfway Between One Unification Day and the Next

by ion_bond



Category: Firefly
Genre: Browncoats, Community: lgbtfest, Culture Shock, Gen, Homophobia, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, Politics, friends who disagree
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-28
Updated: 2008-04-28
Packaged: 2018-04-15 15:53:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4612539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ion_bond/pseuds/ion_bond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war is long over, but Simon isn’t sure which side he would have fought for. </p><p>Written for LGBT Fest for the prompt: "The surest way to tell someone is a Browncoat? They think gender matters when it comes to who you sleep with. And neither Simon nor River know quite how to react to that."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halfway Between One Unification Day and the Next

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thelastgoodname](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelastgoodname/gifts).



> I didn’t have a Chinese language expert, not even an inept one, so my apologies to any Mandarin speakers who read this story. Many thanks to cmk418 and layangabi, who betaed in spite of deadline confusion and technical difficulties.

It was cold inside the ship’s common room, though not as cold as it was outside _Serenity_ , Simon reminded himself. He stretched out on the love seat, socked feet on the pillow, one hand tucked inside his brocade vest between the third and fourth buttons, eyes half-closed, and imagined himself lying in a sunbeam on a planet somewhere, a planet with a sun. He wasn’t made for the black.

Half an hour ago, after an exhaustive search of the ship, he had finally located River, missing since after breakfast, curled in on herself behind a stack of crates containing stolen who-knew-what down in the second cargo bay. He had left her there to sleep. If he were a better person, he would have woken her and taken her back to their berth, but honestly, he didn’t want the trouble. _Am I my brother’s keeper?_ he asked himself, thinking of Cain, and grimaced. Yes, yes he was, for better or worse. Not that he was overly concerned about Shepherd Book judging him for his fraternal negligence -- he was more worried about Mal finding River and yelling at her.

He rubbed his head deeper into the cushion behind him and closed his eyes the rest of the way. This week, he was trying River on very small doses of a new atypical anti-psychotic obtained from the medical center on Ariel, monitoring her blood cell counts and watching her carefully for side-effects. The medical journals had indicated that the drug might synergize with the benzos he already had her on, leaving her sedated and lethargic, but so far, the opposite result seemed to be very much in evidence, which was interesting. She’d been running around during the days, and was having more trouble than usual sleeping at night; Simon consequently felt a little lethargic himself. He was glad she was finally napping, even if she had picked an off-limits area in which to do it.

“Hey hey.”

Simon self-consciously withdrew his hand from his vest and sat up. “Hi, Wash.”

“If you think that makes you look distinguished, I’ve got hard news for you, friend.”

“I’m just cold,” Simon explained a bit stiffly, swinging his legs off the couch so that Wash could sit on one end.

“It is nippy in here.” Wash pulled out a wadded-up blanket from between the cushions and tossed it to Simon. “Here.”

“I was wondering where that had gone,” said Simon. “Thanks. Maybe one of us should ask Kaylee about adjusting the life-support.”

“Don’t look at me -- I’m on my lunch break.” Wash smiled wryly. “Besides, I think your criticisms might be more properly directed at our tightfisted captain. Kaylee’s been riding him for weeks now about some part that’s wearing.”

“Shi ma?” Simon sighed. “I can’t say I’m surprised. I wonder if it’s any better in the shuttles.”

“You go ahead on and ask Inara, if you want, but I’m staying right here. I really don’t want to risk catching her in flagrante delicto with her latest gentleman or lady or zhong xing ren. Who knows what might be going on in there these days.” He gave a mock shudder, and Simon remembered, again, that he was among the barbarian hordes. He hated how much that sounded like his father, but there it was.

He couldn’t continue this conversation. “I think I’ll just go talk to Kaylee.”

“I don’t blame you,” Wash said, and Simon, who was already in the companionway, did not turn around to answer. A person could look at this one of two ways, he thought, trailing his fingers along the curved wall. Maybe he was bravely keeping his temper in check for the greater good of preserving a place for himself and his sister on _Serenity_ , the safest hideout they’d found. Or maybe he was capitulating to a bunch of bigots, because it was easier.

Simon was a kid when the war began. His parents supported unification -- “like all thinking people,” his father, Gabriel, would say -- and he and River were always Alliance soldiers when they played. By the time he was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, though, during the last bitter dregs of the war, when Independent Faction troops were being crushed at every battle, forced to hop back from moon to moon, Simon supported the underdog -- in almost the same way that one might support a losing football team, he thought in retrospect.

The last year of the war, he and some of his friends had Commander Michael Zhuge tee shirts, which they wore religiously under their school uniforms to commemorate the martyred rebel leader. His parents, Simon decided, had special interests and class prejudices. They were soft and naive and selfish.

He still remembered vividly the lecture Gabriel gave him when he found out. “It’s easy to support a revolution in the abstract, when it’s too far away to hurt you,” his father had said. “I can see the romantic attraction. But you don’t know what that shirt means. You don’t know who Michael Zhuge was, and I believe that’s an insult to the dead on both sides. He’s not someone to idealize. Don’t get me wrong -- neither is General Wilkins on our side -- but Zhuge did some bad things.”

“He died in an Alliance-sponsored prison camp!” Simon protested. “Our side shut him up! Are you saying he deserved that? You tell me each person has a right to make his or her own decisions. How can you possibly argue against autonomy for the rim planets?”

“The rim planets don’t know what’s good for them,” Gabriel said. “They want political freedoms so that they can impose backward constraints upon their citizens. The rebels want more private firearms and less rule of law out in the black. They want to hang adulterers and castrate homosexuals. They want the ‘freedom’ to marry their daughters off at River’s age or younger for the dowry and to regulate indentured servitude outside of Alliance control. Can you see where this will go, if it’s allowed?” He paused ominously. “On some border moons, you know, they leave their elderly out in the cold to die when they can’t work any more.”

Simon tried to picture brave Commander Zhuge throwing his aged mother over his shoulder and trekking with her out into the wastes, leaving her behind in a crater somewhere. It was silly, as ridiculous as imagining Alliance soldiers resorting to cannibalism like River always insisted she and Simon do in her games. He laughed. “Where did you read that, Father? Don’t you think you’re going a little overboard?”

“Don’t speak to me that way,” Gabriel said. “Just think about your way of life and the things you enjoy doing, and don’t glamorize the Independent Faction. Research them yourself -- not the larger-than-life personalities involved, but the facts. You’re lucky. You won’t ever find out what would happen if they won.”

Simon had thought again of Michael Zhuge’s mother. He couldn’t help grinning. “Maybe you’re the one who’s lucky.”

At the end of the passageway connecting the abdomen of the firefly to its thorax, the sliding door of the engine room was open. Simon knocked on the metal frame to alert Kaylee to his presence, and swung his weight onto the ladder. Many of Gabriel's points were correct, Simon had decided as he got older. He was glad Unification had won out. Now, seven years after the last trumpet blew, so to speak, he was getting a tour through the rim planets on a leaky pirate ship to prove to him firsthand that in the ass-end of the ‘verse, some things hadn’t changed, Alliance victory notwithstanding.

When he first met them, Simon remembered, he assumed that Kaylee and Inara were lovers. There was something in how the two women bent their heads together, a suggestive element to the natural, unthinking way that they touched which made him suspect. Simon was a doctor and he trusted himself to read body language, but in this case he was wrong; once he remembered that he was on a Browncoat ship with a Browncoat captain and a mostly Browncoat-sympathetic crew, he was glad that he hadn’t put his foot in it by saying something about their relationship that might have endangered himself and River.

Inara was intimate with everyone, Simon soon learned, even as she kept them at arms length -- probably something to do with her Companion training. As for Kaylee, though, Simon still wondered idly who she would have chosen to sleep with, if she really had free choice.

The engine room was warmer than the living space above, uncomfortably so. Kaylee was on her knees with her back to him when he arrived, leaning into one of the drivers to fiddle with the opposing pistons, it looked like, but she withdrew and turned at the dull clank of his feet on the rungs of the ladder, smiling up at him. “Simon! What’s new?” She wiped the grease off her hands onto her jumpsuit. Her hair curled around her face in wet tendrils.

Simon couldn’t bring himself to inquire about the climate control when she was clearly working on the grav drive. “What did you do in the war?” he said instead, finding a safe-looking part of the wall and leaning against it.

She laughed, one short, quick sound. “You know you’ve been on this boat too long, you start asking everybody that. I was a kid, Simon.”

“OK, then. What did your parents do?”

She wiped her clean hands on her thighs again, and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “We’re from way out to Parth. My folks were Independents. That’s the way I grew up thinking, I guess.”

“What would you think if you’d been born somewhere else?”

“What kind of question is that? How would I know?”

It was unfair of him, that he was making her answer a challenge different from the one he was ostensibly raising, but Simon was stung, despite himself. “I spend a lot of time considering what I would think if I came from somewhere else,” he told her. It was true. When he read a book or checked the news streams on the cortex, when talked to a nurse or a patient, he tried to remember that his background wasn’t theirs, that there might be very sensible environmental or social reasons for other people to disagree with him. “It’s a good exercise,” Simon said, “to examine the basis of one’s convictions, instead of just assuming that they’re right.”

“Well,” she said, turning back to the engine, “It must be real fine to be rich and have so much time.”

There was nothing, really, to say to that. “It was, I guess,” Simon allowed. He let his body skid down the wall until he was sitting on the grille, legs tucked into his chest -- one of his sister’s typical postures.

“I don’t think I’d want to fight on either side of a war,” said Kaylee. “And that’s it. What about you? I know you had to undertake not to do no harm to nobody in order to be a doctor, but who would you doctor for, if it was ten years ago today?”

“The Alliance,” said Simon.

“Oh,” said Kaylee, her brown eyes soft with concern. “After what they did to River? Really?”

“If you thought you knew my answer, why did you ask?” Simon said sharply. “Look. Humans are cruel animals, and some of us are monsters. We do horrible things to each other on every planet and moon there is, from slavery to murder to--”

“That don’t make it OK!”

“I didn’t say it did!” He rubbed at his closed eyelids, trying to marshal his thoughts. “I come from Capital City on Osiris, and my people -- my rich parents, my friends and colleagues -- are pro-Alliance. It was safe there, and I always felt free. I have really tried to think about this from every possible angle, and it’s hard for me to believe that the people who took part in the secret government project that ruined my sister, the individuals who experimented on her and tortured her, that they just nullify all the opportunities I had because I grew up there, every good intention, every civilizing influence ...” He trailed off, looking around him at all the machines whose functions he could not even guess at. “This has been hard for me, dong ma? Moving out to the border, going on the run, even though it was the only way? There are a lot of things that are different out here that I just can’t wrap my mind around. Like Inara and that woman, the Councilor.”

“Is that what this is about? Look, she don’t do it that often, just two or three times since I’ve been on the ship, and I’m sure she’s got her reasons.”

“What do you think of it, Kaylee?” Simon asked her gently.

“I know two women together is wrong, but I don’t think it means much,” she said. “It’s not love -- it’s just like with her men, isn’t it?”

“You mean quick and for the credits? I don’t think Inara would appreciate that.”

“No. I mean business. It’s a business that ain’t everybody going to approve of.”

Simon let out the air in his lungs. “When I was seventeen, my father cheated on my mother with a man.”

“Oh, Simon. I’m sorry.” She crouched down next to him. “That’s hard. Was he bo li?”

“Is my father a tong xing lian zhe? A homosexual? I don’t know. Certainly bisexual, at least. What I mean is, that part wasn’t a big deal on Osiris. My mother felt betrayed by his infidelity, certainly, but it didn’t matter that his lover was another man. She choose not to divorce him, for the sake of their business and social lives, and he continued to see Ravi.”

“I’m sorry,” Kaylee said again, and it came to Simon that this had not been the best story to illustrate his point, but it had seemed far easier to tell Kaylee about Gabriel than to talk about himself and his own preferences. It was ironic, Simon thought, to feel like he should have this conversation with her, of all people, but it made sense, too. He wanted to know what she would have to say.

“What I’m trying to express is that on the core worlds, the gender of the person you love doesn’t make a difference,” he said. “Homosexual relationships are seen as just as natural as any other relationships. I’ve been with men, Kaylee, and I would be proud if my sister decided to be with another woman.”

“How can you be sure that’s right?” Kaylee asked. “Have you questioned your convictions?” She did not seem to be taking much pleasure in throwing his words back at him, Simon observed; she looked concerned.

“I guess it goes beyond what I think is right,” said Simon. “It’s the way I am, and a lot of good people who I respect. It’s who I love.” He had never had to explain this before; in his experience, everyone already understood it, but here, they didn’t. His father would think it was a waste of time, to try to talk to someone with already-formed ideas that were so backward. “It goes along with a lot of other things I believe are better about the Alliance areas. Well-administered regulation can be beneficial for people. Look at the difference between what Inara does and prostitution on the border worlds. Shouldn’t the government make it safe for everyone to choose what they want to do?”

Kaylee sat cross-legged opposite him, watching his face. Behind them, the engines ticked quietly. “Well, shouldn’t everyone get to choose their government?”

“God,” said Simon. “I don’t know. I guess they should. In a perfect universe.” He felt his face flushing with frustration, his shirt sticking to his upper back. He remembered the old fight with his father. The statistics about live birth rate in the core versus the rim. Michael Zhuge’s habit of recruiting and arming children to fight. Those were powerful arguments.

“There’s bad things go on out here, and people are real mean. Same as everywhere, like you said. But you’re running from the Alliance,” Kaylee reminded softly. “Right now.”

“I know that,” Simon said. “But sometimes, I feel like I’m hiding from the Browncoats, too, even here on this ship. I don’t really know what side I would have joined.” He took a deep breath. “It makes me feel uncomfortable that you and the others think there’s something wrong with us.”

“Not Inara,” said Kaylee, dropping her eyes. “Nor Book, I don’t think.”

“If there was another war, maybe I’d join their side,” said Simon. “Whatever that is.”

Kaylee got to her feet and crossed back over to her stalled driver. “That’d be the smartest course,” she said. “Wouldn’t want to get in the wrong with a sharpshooting Shepherd.”

“No.” Simon stood up too. He wondered what Book’s affiliation had been. He could ask the man, of course, but he’d really rather not. “Hey, when’s Unification Day?” he asked Kaylee.

“Not for another six or seven months. Don’t you remember how the captain and Zoë and Jayne got tossed out of that bar? Weren’t you with us then?”

“Oh yeah.” He’d have to pay more attention next year, if they were all still here.

“It’s a poor name for a holiday that causes so many hard feelings. You fixin’ to gloat next time around?”

“Believe me, I wouldn’t dare. I was just wondering.” Simon started to climbed back up the ladder. “Do you think Independence Day would have worked out better?”

“There would sure as hell still be bar fights,” said Kaylee.

He slid the door almost closed behind him, leaving a three inch gap for breathing down there, and crossed over to the cargo area on the catwalk. She never said that _she_ didn’t mind him. Simon wondered if it would have helped if he had tried to kiss her while she crouched in front of him, skin glowing with sweat and sympathy. He wondered if he still wanted to kiss her, knowing what she thought of people like him. Was that fair?

He had River’s twenty-five milligrams of zycontapine in a capsule in his pocket. He might as well take her to the mess for lunch so that he could administer it on schedule. He found her, still behind the crates, with her eyes wide and her bare legs stretched out in front of her, sketching what looked to be a compound pulley system in the dust. “Hi, mei-mei,” he said, catching her wrists and pulling her to her feet.

“Ollie ollie in come free!” said River.

“Yeah, sure. Look, we have to go upstairs now. Time to eat.”

“All right. I am ready for minimal protein.”

“And your pills, I hope,” Simon said. “Are you tired today?”

She took hold of his hand, ready to be led. “I had a nap,” she said balefully.

Simon considered her. She was like a child, sometimes, but she was an adult, really. What if River wanted to have sex with Kaylee? He wasn’t sure, any more, when to trust his little sister and let her fly by her own signals. “Do you remember how I said that there were some things we couldn’t talk about here? Like Father’s Ravi, and you and Lydia?” he reminded. “I think you should talk about whatever you want to, OK? The barbarians will just have to learn to deal with us.”

“No,” said River. “I don’t remember anyhow. I remember half the things you tell me, a quarter of the things that came before, one-eight of the things I have done.”

“What do you remember one-sixteenth of?”

She looked at him with a blank expression, as she sometimes did. “No one listens to me, it doesn’t matter how loud I say it.”

“That’s not true,” said Simon comfortably. “After lunch, we’ll have a talk with Mal about better ways of loading cargo and mechanical advantage, OK?” He taped at her pictograph, then shifted his arm to hang it around her slight shoulders. “And the climate control. That too.” They went to the mess together.

fin.


End file.
